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Regular
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Re: Mystic aa's look dated
I appreciate the civil tone Savne, and I don't pretend to know it all, so I welcome the input and discussion. I have changed my AA lines 20 or more times since I started raiding, so I agree with you that we can't ever make up our mind completely. Especially with the expansion coming out next week, and the new gear and AA lines we get.
As a Mystic, I am usually in the OT group, so our healing methods might vary a little bit since you are in the MT group and a Defiler, but it seems to me that curing dots as fast as possible allows both of us to throw more wards, heals, and debuffs, inbetween the mob's AoEs, thus preventing more damage from the AoEs in total. This might open a can of worms with some of you, since there is some disagreement about how to compare casting speed to reuse speed. Hopefully we can avoid all that drama and just refer back to the threads already posted on the subject. My two cents: reuse and casting speed are similar in benefit, so it is wise to find whatever balance you can between them in your group/gear/AA spec setup.
Setting up a macro to cure a tank, or any key person in the raid, is a great method of curing and I am sure you are right that it speeds up curing a lot. Unfortunately, I don't think many healers cure this way, and it's a shame. As an OT healer I have macro'd both MT healers and the tank, and have learned to use it more often than traditional methods of targeting. In some fights, if I have time, I randomly hit the button just incase they got a dot at that moment. Wish there was a cure parse program!
Depending on the fight, I might want to switch out gear and max out casting speed instead of reuse speed. With the Robe of Alendine (10% Casting Improvement), the Darklight SoH Buckler (Forget the name now) (5% Casting), maybe the Oiled Boots (5%), and with a Dirge and Coecer I get Allegro (8%), Coercive Healing (15%) and Monks give the whole raid something like 14% casting speed. So total that is 55+% casting speed with the right setup. Then you add in STA line AA spec with 8 points in cures giving 80% faster cast time on cures on top of the 57% boost you already have, and cures happen in a blink of an eye. I single target cure a whole group in no time, which increases DPS and increases HPS since both get to happen more that I am not curing and instead warding/healing, and my raid is not stifled, stunned, or whatever. Remember if you are curing multiple people, then casting speed is very important since each cure you cast takes a set amount of time, and you have to add up say 3-4 cures to figure out how .4 faster cure time is really .4 x 4 = 1.6 seconds faster. You can use that 1.6 seconds you save to get that single target ward up quicker, etc...
I have seen quite a few tanks die in my time, and every time I am sure everyone in the raid would have wanted them to have 1100 more HP at the time, and Coagulate delivers. You might not have noticed it kick in since a normal health bar is 10,000+ HP when green and when it goes negative the whole bar represents 1100 HP, so the tank either dies or is healed out of that state in half a second if everyone is healing him.
I have allways disagreed with the traditional shaman view that we should cast mainly wards and let others heal. There are exceptions to every rule, such as when your wards are falling as fast as you cast them, then by all means only spam wards since they are more effecient than heals. But, if your ward is up, and you are using Profit UI and can see it as a semi-healthy ward with lots of HP in it, then cast your group and single target heals on people who need it. Also, most the time when people die in a raid it heals the mob 100,000 HP or some crazy amount, so as a healer we are in effect helping the DPS people out quite a bit when we cast heals across raid and keep people alive instead of DPS as some Shaman's choose to do. By maxing out Ritual, you increase your heals by 32%, and as a result will get people green quicker. I usually only have time to cast a couple heals, so I want them to be as big as possible. Once again, use the macro techinque like you did with cures and macro Ritual as an auto cast on all your heals. That way when Ritual is up and you throw a rare heal, it is a lot bigger.
As far as the tradeoff between Ritual and Reuse speed, I guess if you have 4 points in Ritual then it is not that huge of a tradeoff to put 4 points in reuse instead. The only thing that irks me about that is when someone dies after I sent them a heal, and it makes me wonder if the heal was 2%, 4%, 6%, or 8% bigger would they have died? Having a higher reuse speed doesn't necessarily lead to that same conclusion. We have a choice of many varieties of heals and wards, and just because a particular ward or heal comes back up .3 seconds quicker due to AA points being put in reuse, doesn't mean we will be casting a particular spell as soon as it is up. That is unless we are sitting around waiting for that spell to come up and are not casting something else which is a no-no usually. Mystics have emergency single target and group wards with long recast timers, but I think we use them sparingly since they are insurance for when all hell breaks loose. So having a faster reuse timer on them is nice, but not necessary. I don't think any of us rely on those emergency wards nearly as much as we rely on keeping people healed up all the time. You also get 15% reuse from group buffs like: Riana's Indignant Sustain (5%) & Coercive Healing (10%). I think the Rune Etched Helm has 3% reuse as well, so 4% more reuse from 4 points of AA seems pricey to me when you already have reuse buffs with 4 times that amount.
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stupid. I'll just be patient get my last aa and enjoy the stances.
